The Whopper Temptation

Harry Reid doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with Obamacare that a few more lies won’t fix.

So what if President Obama’s claim that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” was widely cited as the “lie of the year?” Lying by the nation’s ruling elites has gone viral. How else to explain federal judges all over the land insisting with straight faces that marriage has only existed in the law for the sole reason of denying same-sex couples? The dishonesty and ruthless power plays are stunning.

Last Wednesday, the Senate Majority Leader from Nevada lauded the Affordable Care Act, and declared that, "Despite all that good news, there's plenty of horror stories being told. All of them are untrue, but they're being told all over America."

That must be comforting to millions who have been given a pink slip, higher premiums, or lost their coverage – especially people with serious illnesses.

Mr. Reid cited ads sponsored by Americans for Prosperity (AFP) about women cancer patients losing coverage, and said that they were “made up from whole cloth,” a charge that AFP heatedly denies. He lambasted libertarian philanthropists David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch, accusing the “billionaire brothers” of “trying to buy America.” Channeling his inner Hugo Chavez, Mr. Reid variously described the Kochs as “oil magnates” and “multi-billionaire brothers.” B-b-b-billionaires.

Mr. Reid must really hate rich people. That is, unless they give heavily to left-wing causes, like Quark founder Tim Gill, Hollywood impresario David Geffen, Las Vegas big shots, “green” crony capitalists, or George Soros. An America-hating currency manipulator, Mr. Soros bankrolls the Open Society Foundation, whose giving to liberal groups “hit $11 million in 2013, more than triple the $3.25 million it spent the previous year,” according to the Washington Post.

Mr. Reid also launched the whopper about Mitt Romney cheating the IRS. “During the 2012 presidential election, the media never made Reid pay a political price for spreading the false rumor that for years Romney paid no taxes,” John Nolte wrote at Breitbart.com.

Mr. Reid also had no problem with the “Joe Soptic ad” in 2012, an emotion-packed narrative from a man who blamed his wife’s cancer death on Mr. Romney even though Mr. Romney’s former firm had closed the plant where Mr. Soptic had worked five years before and Mr. Soptic’s wife had her own health coverage.

After the ad was exposed as a fraud, it stayed on TV. So what if it’s a bald-faced lie? You can’t make a revolution without breaking a few eggs. If you’re caught, keep lying. Even the liberal-leaning Politifact.com website had this to say about the Soptic ploy:

“Bill Burton, a former Obama aide who is the head of Priorities USA Action, appeared on CNN to defend the ad on Aug. 8, 2012, and denied that the ad suggests that Romney is responsible for the early death of Soptic’s wife. ‘We would never make that case,’ Burton said.”

Politifact: “But we find that preposterous. The force of the ad’s narrative is inescapable. The story begins with the plant closing and ends with a woman’s death.”

On Feb. 25, Vice President Joe Biden mischaracterized new voter photo ID laws in Alabama, North Carolina and Texas as products of “hatred.”

“Hatred never, never goes away,” Mr. Biden said. He and Harry Reid should know. “The zealotry of those who wish to limit the franchise cannot be smothered by reason," Mr. Biden thundered.

Ah, reason.

I’d like to report that Mr. Biden indulged in rational consistency by characterizing as “haters” all Department of Motor Vehicles personnel, airline agents, liquor store clerks, welfare bureaucrats, bank tellers and the U.S. Department of Justice guards who ask people for a photo ID. But he didn’t.

Finally, there’s Susan E. Rice. The current National Security Advisor ought to get a job at Burger King. She’s flipping Whoppers again. On Sept. 16, 2012, as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, she went on network talk shows to insist that the terrorist attack five days before on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans dead, was a “spontaneous reaction” to an anti-Muslim video.

For two weeks, administration officials repeated the lie. It’s now clear that the White House knew in real time that the attack was not a riot over a video. And yet, here was Ms. Rice again, on Feb. 23, telling NBC that “the notion that I or anybody else in the administration misled the American people is patently false, and I think that that’s been amply demonstrated.”

Something’s been amply demonstrated. It’s the ruling elites’ use of shockingly obvious lies in pursuit of fundamentally transforming America.

Jesus was not particularly subtle about dishonesty, telling the ruling elites of His time: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. … for he is a liar and the father of lies.”